if one of the things they taught in driving school was how to adjust your side mirrors properly.
Most people have their side mirrors adjusted so as to point back down the side of the vehicle, which is not very useful. If you adjust them to point into the next lane over, you can completely eliminate the blind spot. A good way to set this up is to put your head against the side window and adjust the left mirror so that the side of the car is just barely visible, then align your head with the centerline of the car and do the same with the right mirror. With a little tweaking, you should be able to track passing cars on either side from the inside mirror to the side mirror to the side window without ever losing sight of them.
A friend in Boston who was living there at the time said nobody with any common sense believed they could do what they were promising for that price, and were pretty certain that it the number they came up with was just to get the project sold.
This is indeed the case; the cost estimates were intentionally lowballed to get the project approved. I was told this by the Big Dig's PR director.
I've heard that one with Harvard and Yale students in place of UGA and GA Tech, and the third being a Princeton student who walks in, washes his hands and the goes to the urinal, saying "At Princeton, they teach us to wash our hands before handling a sacred object."
One evening some time ago, a couple of friends of mine discovered this enormous pile of old retail candy bins sitting out on the curb. They were loading as many as would fit into their car when the homeowner came out and told them there was another big pile in the garage, from their candy store that they had recently closed. They called the friend whose house they had just left, who immediately dashed over there, pausing just long enough to take the seats out of his minivan.
I scored 4 of them; they're made of clear heavy plastic and each as 4 drawers approx. 4" wide by 8" high by 12" deep. They needed thorough cleaning (still had various bits of candy stuck to them), but they're incredibly useful for storing computer bits and all the other detritus of geekly existence.
That was my employer at the time. We released a driver that pushed our Winmark score up to 40, while ATI had 25 or so, and needless to say got caught. The story goes that Marketing had been complaining that ATI had Winmark cheats in their drivers, and ZD wasn't doing anything about it, so we put in as many cheats as we could think of, supposedly to make a point. Of course, all it accomplished was to give us a big ol' black eye. Wouldn't have been the dumbest stunt those clowns in Marketing ever pulled either. There's a reason that company isn't around anymore.
It gets worse, though: around the same time, one of the video chipset manufacturers got caught putting Winmark optimizations in hardware.
This is what the "works specifically excluded from this agreement" section of the standard employee confidentiality and inventions agreement is for. If it doesn't have one, add one.
What makes a good movie is not the same as what makes a good book. In fact, the two are often diametrically opposed.
If you cannot grasp this simple fact, no book-to-movie adaptation will ever make you happy.
Though I do wonder what specifically you would have done differently from Jackson, and for that matter which scenes you think were stolen from the animated version(s). (There is one shot, the one where Odo Proudfoot says "ProudFEET!", that Jackson deliberately set up to be identical to a scene in the animated film, as a sort of tribute to it.)
Re:Negative review, but not (intentional) flamebai
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
·
· Score: 2
To me, Faramir was a character that made a lot of sense. He's leading a rogue army, and he captures these hobbits who he doesn't know from Adam. They have a good story but they lie about Gollum ebing with them. What would you do? Send them on their way? I sure wouldn't.
That was my problem with Faramir's character in the book, actually. Think about this: he's in the same fix as Boromir; he's trying to save his people from what looks like an unstoppable onslaught from Mordor and has long since given up hope, and has just recently found his brother's dead body floating down the river, and along come these two funny little people with the Enemy's greatest weapon and this weird fish-smelling slinking creature that they initially disavow any comnection to. They claim that they're going to try to sneak into the very heart of Mordor to toss this weapon into the fires of Mount Doom. So he lets them head off on this suicidal mission that seems likely to end with them getting killed and Sauron getting his little trinket back. Huh? I thought the movie's portrayal of Faramir made a lot more sense.
Apparently in the book his life is forfeit if letting them go proves to be bad for his city, in the movie he's going to be executed because he let them go regardless of whether it's good or not (this is a nit pick on a single line, but the line really changes a lot).
Remember that in ROTK, Denethor gets rather torqued at Faramir for letting them go. I'll bet that next year we'll see Denethor have to be restrained from whacking Faramir's fool head off right then and there.
In speculating about possible changes to TTT, I actually thought that they could remove the Faramir sequence entirely, as it actually doesn't add much more to the plot of the book than Tom Bombadil does to FOTR (other than giving Gandalf and Pippin an update on Frodo and Sam's progress in ROTK), and seemed like it wouldn't translate well to film. I like PJ's solution better.
At the midnight showing I went to, they rolled the film with no preamble-- no previews, no ads for the concession stand; they turned off the slides and rolled the film. One of our number was out getting popcorn, but fortunately hadn't turned off his cellphone yet.
And, oh yes, did it ever kick insane amounts of ass.
Bulger wasn't the boss of the local Mafia, if that's what you mean by "the Boston mob". He was boss of a mostly-Irish gang unrelated to the Mafia, but was in a position to give the FBI lots of information on them. The Boston FBI office got a wee bit overzealous in their pursuit of the Mafia, and pretty much gave Bulger and his gang free reign in order to protect this valuable informant, to the point of obstructing state investigations of him and tipping him off in 1995 that he was about to be indicted, enabling him to flee.
It just occurred to me, I wonder if those psych books poisoned the well for any of the geek books. "I'm ordering Java in A Nutshell and it's recommending books on self-mutilation?!"
(ok, maybe that's one's not so far off...)
don't anthropomorphize computers. they hate that.
on
When Profiling Goes Wrong
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I find it interesting that people are talking about their Tivo's like they're sentient beings crouched on top of the TV, casting judgement on the crap you watch and recommending new crap to watch. It's just a computer program, people, and likely a fairly simple one at that.
I don't have a Tivo (or a TV, for that matter), but my Amazon profile still hasn't recovered from when my wife was in graduate school studying developmental psychology, specializing in childhood trauma. More books about child sexual abuse, just what I wanted. =:-O The programming books are staging a comeback, though.
What I find particularly interesting are the "people who ordered this also ordered these" selections. On infrequently-ordered titles, it only takes one or two wackos with bizarre profiles to generate some really peculiar results.
Although Indiana Jones, embodied by Harrison Ford, does not resemble the young reporter and his golf knickers, many scenes of the movie look as if they come from the adventures of Tintin or Blake et Mortimer.
For instance, the temple where the Holy Grail is found in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the same as the temple where Emir Ben Kalish Ezab takes refuge in the Tintin story The Red Sea Sharks. Both are modeled on the real-life rock city of Petra in Jordan, but it's clear that Spielberg took his inspiration for that setting from the Tintin story.
I'm one of those few Americans who grew up reading Tintin. My battered copy of Red Rackham's Treasure that I was given when I was 7 is probably my oldest possesion. I can't imagine how any director could do a worthwhile job of making a live-action Tintin movie, but Spielberg? He's done some amazing work, yes, but this is the man who reportedly wanted to set the Harry Potter series in an American high school.
While the Acela design uses a lot of TGV technology, a major difference is that the Acelas are much heavier, which is partially due to FRA regulations pertaining to how much compressive force a railcar or locomotive must be able to withstand. There's a lot less of passenger trians sharing tracks with long, heavy freight trains in Europe, so their regulations are less strict.
Actually, Amtrak does own most of the Northeast Corridor line between Boston and DC.The parts it doesn't own are between New Haven CT and New Rochelle NY, owned by Metro-North Commuter Railroad, and between the MA/RI border and Boston's South Station, owned by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.
The Acela only gets up to its advertised 150mph on a couple of stretches of straight track in MA and RI. Through most of CT, the line has too many curves and drawbridges, and Metro-North won't let them exceed 79mph on their tracks. Between NY and DC, the catenary (the wire that delivers power to the train) is too old to allow for higher speeds.
Amtrak did massivly upgrade the NY-Boston segment of the line in preparation for the Acelas, but there's only so much curve-straightening you can do without large property takings.
Re:Umm, have we invented electricity yet?
on
Jet Turbine Locomotives
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Most heavily-used mainline railroads in the US do have continuously-welded rail. It's expensive and tricky to build correctly, so they don't bother with it on more lightly-used lines.
Same applies to concrete ties, bi-directional signaling, centralized traffic control, and all the other technologies that make railroads run faster and more efficiently.
At a weekend camping party that my crowd of geeks has every year, a major part of the event is making an incredible amount of LN2 ice cream. We started out making it the conventional way, then someone heard about making it with LN2 and brought some to experiment with, and we quickly discovered that it makes better ice cream and is much faster (important when you're making quart quantities of a lot of flavors. So now it's all LN2. Chocolate Peanut Butter Malted Milk Ball, anyone? How about Coconut Lime Habanero?
We stir the LN2 gradually into the ice cream mix. I don't know how putting the LN2 in the container first would work, because in our experience, different mixes seem to require different amounts of LN2.
A neat thing to do with LN2 is to extract LOX from the air. Pour some LN2 into a metal saucepan, and hold it over another container. Small drips of LOX will condense on the ouside of the saucepan and drip into the other container.
Americans spend something on the order of 5 hours per day watching TV, and I don't see anyone writing hand-wringing books about that. Maybe people become "Net addicted" because they're looking for some interactivity and control, rather than sitting there sucking up whatever pap the idiot box is throwing in their faces.
More to the point, the (probable) increase in the number of children being exploted in the creation of child pornography doesn't show up on the FBI's radar for one simple reason: most of it happens offshore, in Asia and Eastern Europe.
And don't forget that Root then travels to Manila with Otto and Rudy. It's never adequately explained why they faked his death, actually.
Remember that Cryptonomicon is but one volume (and I do mean volume!) in a multivolume work, and that the next volume takes place in the 1500's or so. I suspect that we're going to hear a lot more about Societas Eruditorum in that book. The thing that I didn't catch until the second time around was those perforated gold sheets that they found in the wreck of the V-Million. These were the Leibniz-Archiv that Rudy had mentioned in Sweden, and that he had apparently sweet-talked out of Hermann Goering. Hopefully we'll hear more about those in the next volume too.
I would avoid copying mailboxes/messages directly if at all possible; keeping this stuff sync'ed is what IMAP is for, and there are IMAP-aware mail clients for just about every platform including PalmOS. The problem is that you would need to use a client that supports IMAP disconnected mode (which synchronizes a local and remote message store for offline reading), and unfortunately very few do this properly; the only ones I know of is Netscape 4.x on the Windows platform (it doesn't on Unix, and Netscape 6 doesn't at all), though I think HandMail for PalmOS does as well.
There's a utility called isync that synchronizes a local maildir-style message store with a remote IMAP server, but it only supports maildir, and I've found it somewhat tricky to configure. I'm in the thinking-about-it stage of writing a similar utility to support mbox.
- The only contested elections on your ballot are for Pez/Veep, US Senator and county register of probate (what does the register of probate do, anyway?); US Representative, State Senator and Representative and the rest of the municipal and county offices are Democratic incumbents running unopposed.
- You wonder why someone's bothering to hold a sign for our US Representative (see above).
- The Libertarian candidate for US Senator is doing a lot better than the Republican candidate. Of course, they're both tilting at a giant windmill named Edward M. Kennedy, who didn't even bother to campaign this year.
- The guy holding a sign for Nader (who turned out to be a friend of mine from college; hi Jamie!) says to a passerby "Vote for Nader; Gore's going to win Massachusetts anyway!"
is why there's all this hand-wringing about the Net supposedly leading to social isolation etc. etc., yet you pretty much never hear people whining about television having these effects. When you consider that the Net can involve actual social interaction and TV pretty much by definition can't, this is...odd.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong kind of magic smoke.
if one of the things they taught in driving school was how to adjust your side mirrors properly.
Most people have their side mirrors adjusted so as to point back down the side of the vehicle, which is not very useful. If you adjust them to point into the next lane over, you can completely eliminate the blind spot. A good way to set this up is to put your head against the side window and adjust the left mirror so that the side of the car is just barely visible, then align your head with the centerline of the car and do the same with the right mirror. With a little tweaking, you should be able to track passing cars on either side from the inside mirror to the side mirror to the side window without ever losing sight of them.
A friend in Boston who was living there at the time said nobody with any common sense believed they could do what they were promising for that price, and were pretty certain that it the number they came up with was just to get the project sold.
This is indeed the case; the cost estimates were intentionally lowballed to get the project approved. I was told this by the Big Dig's PR director.
I've heard that one with Harvard and Yale students in place of UGA and GA Tech, and the third being a Princeton student who walks in, washes his hands and the goes to the urinal, saying "At Princeton, they teach us to wash our hands before handling a sacred object."
One evening some time ago, a couple of friends of mine discovered this enormous pile of old retail candy bins sitting out on the curb. They were loading as many as would fit into their car when the homeowner came out and told them there was another big pile in the garage, from their candy store that they had recently closed. They called the friend whose house they had just left, who immediately dashed over there, pausing just long enough to take the seats out of his minivan.
I scored 4 of them; they're made of clear heavy plastic and each as 4 drawers approx. 4" wide by 8" high by 12" deep. They needed thorough cleaning (still had various bits of candy stuck to them), but they're incredibly useful for storing computer bits and all the other detritus of geekly existence.
That was my employer at the time. We released a driver that pushed our Winmark score up to 40, while ATI had 25 or so, and needless to say got caught. The story goes that Marketing had been complaining that ATI had Winmark cheats in their drivers, and ZD wasn't doing anything about it, so we put in as many cheats as we could think of, supposedly to make a point. Of course, all it accomplished was to give us a big ol' black eye. Wouldn't have been the dumbest stunt those clowns in Marketing ever pulled either. There's a reason that company isn't around anymore.
It gets worse, though: around the same time, one of the video chipset manufacturers got caught putting Winmark optimizations in hardware.
This is what the "works specifically excluded from this agreement" section of the standard employee confidentiality and inventions agreement is for. If it doesn't have one, add one.
What makes a good movie is not the same as what makes a good book. In fact, the two are often diametrically opposed.
If you cannot grasp this simple fact, no book-to-movie adaptation will ever make you happy.
Though I do wonder what specifically you would have done differently from Jackson, and for that matter which scenes you think were stolen from the animated version(s). (There is one shot, the one where Odo Proudfoot says "ProudFEET!", that Jackson deliberately set up to be identical to a scene in the animated film, as a sort of tribute to it.)
To me, Faramir was a character that made a lot of sense. He's leading a rogue army, and he captures these hobbits who he doesn't know from Adam. They have a good story but they lie about Gollum ebing with them. What would you do? Send them on their way? I sure wouldn't.
That was my problem with Faramir's character in the book, actually. Think about this: he's in the same fix as Boromir; he's trying to save his people from what looks like an unstoppable onslaught from Mordor and has long since given up hope, and has just recently found his brother's dead body floating down the river, and along come these two funny little people with the Enemy's greatest weapon and this weird fish-smelling slinking creature that they initially disavow any comnection to. They claim that they're going to try to sneak into the very heart of Mordor to toss this weapon into the fires of Mount Doom. So he lets them head off on this suicidal mission that seems likely to end with them getting killed and Sauron getting his little trinket back. Huh? I thought the movie's portrayal of Faramir made a lot more sense.
Apparently in the book his life is forfeit if letting them go proves to be bad for his city, in the movie he's going to be executed because he let them go regardless of whether it's good or not (this is a nit pick on a single line, but the line really changes a lot).
Remember that in ROTK, Denethor gets rather torqued at Faramir for letting them go. I'll bet that next year we'll see Denethor have to be restrained from whacking Faramir's fool head off right then and there.
In speculating about possible changes to TTT, I actually thought that they could remove the Faramir sequence entirely, as it actually doesn't add much more to the plot of the book than Tom Bombadil does to FOTR (other than giving Gandalf and Pippin an update on Frodo and Sam's progress in ROTK), and seemed like it wouldn't translate well to film. I like PJ's solution better.
At the midnight showing I went to, they rolled the film with no preamble-- no previews, no ads for the concession stand; they turned off the slides and rolled the film. One of our number was out getting popcorn, but fortunately hadn't turned off his cellphone yet.
And, oh yes, did it ever kick insane amounts of ass.
Bulger wasn't the boss of the local Mafia, if that's what you mean by "the Boston mob". He was boss of a mostly-Irish gang unrelated to the Mafia, but was in a position to give the FBI lots of information on them. The Boston FBI office got a wee bit overzealous in their pursuit of the Mafia, and pretty much gave Bulger and his gang free reign in order to protect this valuable informant, to the point of obstructing state investigations of him and tipping him off in 1995 that he was about to be indicted, enabling him to flee.
(yes, I'm following up to myself. mod me harder.)
It just occurred to me, I wonder if those psych books poisoned the well for any of the geek books. "I'm ordering Java in A Nutshell and it's recommending books on self-mutilation?!"
(ok, maybe that's one's not so far off...)
I find it interesting that people are talking about their Tivo's like they're sentient beings crouched on top of the TV, casting judgement on the crap you watch and recommending new crap to watch. It's just a computer program, people, and likely a fairly simple one at that.
I don't have a Tivo (or a TV, for that matter), but my Amazon profile still hasn't recovered from when my wife was in graduate school studying developmental psychology, specializing in childhood trauma. More books about child sexual abuse, just what I wanted. =:-O The programming books are staging a comeback, though.
What I find particularly interesting are the "people who ordered this also ordered these" selections. On infrequently-ordered titles, it only takes one or two wackos with bizarre profiles to generate some really peculiar results.
Although Indiana Jones, embodied by Harrison Ford, does not resemble the young reporter and his golf knickers, many scenes of the movie look as if they come from the adventures of Tintin or Blake et Mortimer.
For instance, the temple where the Holy Grail is found in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the same as the temple where Emir Ben Kalish Ezab takes refuge in the Tintin story The Red Sea Sharks. Both are modeled on the real-life rock city of Petra in Jordan, but it's clear that Spielberg took his inspiration for that setting from the Tintin story.
I'm one of those few Americans who grew up reading Tintin. My battered copy of Red Rackham's Treasure that I was given when I was 7 is probably my oldest possesion. I can't imagine how any director could do a worthwhile job of making a live-action Tintin movie, but Spielberg? He's done some amazing work, yes, but this is the man who reportedly wanted to set the Harry Potter series in an American high school.
It's a consortium of Bombardier and Alstom.
While the Acela design uses a lot of TGV technology, a major difference is that the Acelas are much heavier, which is partially due to FRA regulations pertaining to how much compressive force a railcar or locomotive must be able to withstand. There's a lot less of passenger trians sharing tracks with long, heavy freight trains in Europe, so their regulations are less strict.
Actually, Amtrak does own most of the Northeast Corridor line between Boston and DC.The parts it doesn't own are between New Haven CT and New Rochelle NY, owned by Metro-North Commuter Railroad, and between the MA/RI border and Boston's South Station, owned by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.
The Acela only gets up to its advertised 150mph on a couple of stretches of straight track in MA and RI. Through most of CT, the line has too many curves and drawbridges, and Metro-North won't let them exceed 79mph on their tracks. Between NY and DC, the catenary (the wire that delivers power to the train) is too old to allow for higher speeds.
Amtrak did massivly upgrade the NY-Boston segment of the line in preparation for the Acelas, but there's only so much curve-straightening you can do without large property takings.
Most heavily-used mainline railroads in the US do have continuously-welded rail. It's expensive and tricky to build correctly, so they don't bother with it on more lightly-used lines.
Same applies to concrete ties, bi-directional signaling, centralized traffic control, and all the other technologies that make railroads run faster and more efficiently.
At a weekend camping party that my crowd of geeks has every year, a major part of the event is making an incredible amount of LN2 ice cream. We started out making it the conventional way, then someone heard about making it with LN2 and brought some to experiment with, and we quickly discovered that it makes better ice cream and is much faster (important when you're making quart quantities of a lot of flavors. So now it's all LN2. Chocolate Peanut Butter Malted Milk Ball, anyone? How about Coconut Lime Habanero?
We stir the LN2 gradually into the ice cream mix. I don't know how putting the LN2 in the container first would work, because in our experience, different mixes seem to require different amounts of LN2.
A neat thing to do with LN2 is to extract LOX from the air. Pour some LN2 into a metal saucepan, and hold it over another container. Small drips of LOX will condense on the ouside of the saucepan and drip into the other container.
Americans spend something on the order of 5 hours per day watching TV, and I don't see anyone writing hand-wringing books about that. Maybe people become "Net addicted" because they're looking for some interactivity and control, rather than sitting there sucking up whatever pap the idiot box is throwing in their faces.
More to the point, the (probable) increase in the number of children being exploted in the creation of child pornography doesn't show up on the FBI's radar for one simple reason: most of it happens offshore, in Asia and Eastern Europe.
And don't forget that Root then travels to Manila with Otto and Rudy. It's never adequately explained why they faked his death, actually.
Remember that Cryptonomicon is but one volume (and I do mean volume!) in a multivolume work, and that the next volume takes place in the 1500's or so. I suspect that we're going to hear a lot more about Societas Eruditorum in that book. The thing that I didn't catch until the second time around was those perforated gold sheets that they found in the wreck of the V-Million. These were the Leibniz-Archiv that Rudy had mentioned in Sweden, and that he had apparently sweet-talked out of Hermann Goering. Hopefully we'll hear more about those in the next volume too.
I would avoid copying mailboxes/messages directly if at all possible; keeping this stuff sync'ed is what IMAP is for, and there are IMAP-aware mail clients for just about every platform including PalmOS. The problem is that you would need to use a client that supports IMAP disconnected mode (which synchronizes a local and remote message store for offline reading), and unfortunately very few do this properly; the only ones I know of is Netscape 4.x on the Windows platform (it doesn't on Unix, and Netscape 6 doesn't at all), though I think HandMail for PalmOS does as well.
There's a utility called isync that synchronizes a local maildir-style message store with a remote IMAP server, but it only supports maildir, and I've found it somewhat tricky to configure. I'm in the thinking-about-it stage of writing a similar utility to support mbox.
- The only contested elections on your ballot are for Pez/Veep, US Senator and county register of probate (what does the register of probate do, anyway?); US Representative, State Senator and Representative and the rest of the municipal and county offices are Democratic incumbents running unopposed.
- You wonder why someone's bothering to hold a sign for our US Representative (see above).
- The Libertarian candidate for US Senator is doing a lot better than the Republican candidate. Of course, they're both tilting at a giant windmill named Edward M. Kennedy, who didn't even bother to campaign this year.
- The guy holding a sign for Nader (who turned out to be a friend of mine from college; hi Jamie!) says to a passerby "Vote for Nader; Gore's going to win Massachusetts anyway!"
is why there's all this hand-wringing about the Net supposedly leading to social isolation etc. etc., yet you pretty much never hear people whining about television having these effects. When you consider that the Net can involve actual social interaction and TV pretty much by definition can't, this is...odd.